Color Grading Mistakes and Fixes: Saturation, Clips, Skin

Common colour grading mistakes shown on a test scene in the free colorgrade.video studio: over-saturation on the vectorscope, crushed blacks in the Clipping view and skin pushed off the skin tone line, with the fix for each.

Color grading tutorial · chapter 13 Color Grading Mistakes and How to Fix Them Ten mistakes that spoil most amateur grades, each with what it looks like, how to spot it on a scope and how to fix it in the studio. Read the chapter →

Key moments

1. 1 Over-saturation , starts at 0:00
2. 2 Crushed blacks , starts at 0:13
3. 3 Skin tones , starts at 0:25
4. 4 Try it yourself , starts at 0:42

Transcript

Over-saturation 0:00

1. 0:01 A test scene with the waveform and vectorscope open.
2. 0:03 Push Saturation too far and the vectorscope trace runs past the 75% targets.
3. 0:08 Vibrance instead of Saturation keeps strong colours and skin in check.

Crushed blacks 0:13

1. 0:13 Heavy contrast crushes the blacks into a flat line on the waveform.
2. 0:18 The Clipping view marks every crushed and clipped area, so ease it back.

Skin tones 0:25

1. 0:25 A strong look at full Intensity drags skin away from the skin tone line.
2. 0:32 Protect skin tones and a lower Intensity bring the faces back to the line.
3. 0:37 A split compare shows the fixed grade against the original.